Wednesday, April 20, 2016

And now, we finally round out the roster of our original Avengers! (Except for some minor rewrites coming for Iron Man and Thor, but shh, don't tell anyone!) This has been a long time coming, but we're finally able to have the complete team together, just in time for them all to break apart and completely reform the team.

Natalia was recruited by the KGB at a young age and was placed into training in the Red Room facility, where she was indoctrinated and educated in Russian spycraft. Her expertise and effectiveness put her on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar very quickly, and Clint Barton was sent after her to eliminate the threat. He disobeyed this order, however, and recommended her as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. From there on, Barton and Romanoff became partners, and Natalia changed her name to Natasha.

In 2009, Natasha had a run in with the legendary Winter Soldier. After being hired to protect a nuclear scientist, the assassin eliminated his target by firing a round through her stomach and into the scientist.

A couple years later, Natasha was put on a mission to infiltrate the Stark Industries legal department, working her way up the corporate ladder to get close to Tony himself and try to keep a close eye on him. She was quickly hired on as Stark's personal assistant after he signed his company over to Pepper Potts.

She witnessed the fight between Tony and Colonel Rhodes at the former's birthday party, and tracked down Stark later on with Fury to lay their cards on the table: they knew he needed to find a cure for the palladium poisoning, but he needed to make progress on it or they'd shut him down.

Romanoff was present at the Battle of Stark Expo, going with Stark's bodyguard to break into Hammer Industries HQ to intercept the terrorist Ivan Vanko. After stealing all the designs they could get their hands on and destroying the building, Natasha was ordered to shadow Bruce Banner at Culver University, and was almost killed as a bystander during the rampage. Afterwards, she was sent to retrieve Banner before General Ross captured him, but failed, instead capturing Samuel Sterns instead.

Romanoff was then dispatched to Moscow, where she searched for missing Stark Industries tech, infiltrating a night club to try and interrogate an illegal arms dealer. Unfortunately, her target was killed by an unknown assailant, and she was forced to escape. The assassin revealed herself as a fan that was after the alias of the Black Widow, and Romanoff agreed to meet with her to try and keep her from interfering further. These and several other confrontations ended in the death of the "admirer," as well as an aborted nuclear missile launch set to destabilize world peace.

Nearly a year later, Romanoff was tasked once again to collect Banner. Tracking him to Kolkata, she convinced him to come and assist S.H.I.E.L.D. with locating the tesseract, stolen by Loki. Banner agreed, and she escorted him to the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, before being assigned to transport Steve Rogers to Germany to capture Loki. During the attack, Stark arrived to halt the fight, capturing Loki, and on the way back to the Helicarrier Thor arrived to attempt to retrieve Loki, prompting Iron Man and Rogers to pursue. Eventually, Thor was persuaded to their side.

Back at the carrier, Natasha used her interrogation skills to trick Loki into telling her that his plan was to unleash the Hulk onto the carrier, but soon after Barton arrived under Loki's control and detonated a bomb on one of the carrier's turbines. The explosion triggered Hulk's transformation, which gave her chase but ultimately knocked her out. Upon waking, she was sent to intercept Barton, knocking him out and breaking Loki's control. Natasha then went on with Barton and Rogers to assist in the battle of New York against the Chitauri, and she was the Avenger able to retrieve Loki's scepter and close the portal.

After this, Romanoff and Rogers became partners working on S.H.I.E.L.D. missions together, going undercover in a terrorist cell in Chicago and gaining their trust to allow Rogers to retrieve a stolen weapon from them. Two years after the battle of New York, her and Rogers were assigned to liberate the Lemurian Star, a S.H.I.E.L.D. vessel hijacked by Georges Batroc, though Natasha's real mission was data retrieval.

After Nick Fury's apparent assassination by the Winter Soldier, Natasha and Cap were forced undercover, trying to unlock Fury's secret USB with some encrypted data on it as their former STRIKE team hunted them down. They eventually found Arnim Zola, stored in a mass of computer banks in an old S.H.I.E.L.D. facility, telling them that he was recruited in Operation Paperclip and began to reform HYDRA within S.H.I.E.L.D. before a missile strike annihilated the base.

They survived and made their way to Sam Wilson, a friend of Rogers', and enlisted his help in overturning the HYDRA conspiracy, but not before another run-in with the Winter Soldier. After being taken to a hidden facility where Fury was still alive, they organized a plan to topple HYDRA and S.H.I.E.L.D., where Romanoff posed as a member of the World Security Council to get close enough to Alexander Pierce, Secretary of Defense and HYDRA agent, to get him to leak all of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s old files. She then spent the next year or so attempting to find a new identity.

Natasha was eventually called back into action by Maria Hill, retrieving Loki's stolen scepter from a HYDRA base under Baron von Strucker. In this time, Romanoff and Banner had formed a close relationship, where she assisted him in calming down enough to revert into the good doctor. She was instrumental in the Ultron incursion, keeping track of Ultron's moves around the globe and assisting in intercepting Ultron's cradle, but was captured and taken back to Strucker's old fortress as a prisoner. Sending a signal out to the Avengers, she was rescued by Banner and assisted in the Battle of Sokovia by evacuating civilians and keeping Ultron's drones from dropping the city back to the earth.

Natasha is currently training and co-leading the New Avengers team alongside Captain America, and new recruits War Machine, Falcon, Vision, and Scarlet Witch.
—DoctorBoson

Monday, April 4, 2016

As we enter the month leading into Civil War, I felt like it would be prudent to try and start wrapping up some of the loose ends from the big movie characters, and it seemed like a good idea to work on a character that is probably not going to be developed anymore ever.

Speed (17): Super Sonic Speed, –8 to hit. Blinding Reflexes, Catch and Throw. Limitation (–2, when Clubs are drawn in combat, make a Vigor roll; on a failure, he is Shaken. On a roll of 1 or less, he gains a level of Fatigue).

Pietro Maximoff was born in Sokovia with his twin sister, Wanda. At the age of 10, their parents were killed in a bombing, and they both spent two days trapped in the rubble of their apartment with a Stark weapon. They developed a deep hatred for America and Tony Stark, which later extended to the Avengers as a whole. In their adulthood, the twins attended multiple protests against both the States and S.H.I.E.L.D.

The country of Sokovia is small and has been occupied several times in recent history. The Maximoffs participated in riots against foreign forces until they were approached by a HYDRA scientist offering to give them great power. Pietro was utterly convinced to accept, and he was brought with his sister to a secret experimental facility, where the scientists subjected them to the mysterious chitauri scepter. While many volunteers perished, Wanda and Pietro survived with incredible abilities.

Several months after these experiments began, the facility that the twins were in was assaulted by the Avengers attempting to retrieve the scepter. In the confusion, and against the wishes of Baron Von Strucker, Pietro and Wanda escaped to disrupt the assault. Pietro intercepted and smashed into Hawkeye, dropping him to the ground before speeding off and slamming into Captain America and returning to his sister inside the fortress. She convinced him to let Tony go and deconstruct the Avengers from the inside. As HYDRA fell, the twins escaped.

Pietro began to steal to provide for his sister, but Ultron caught wind of them and convinced them to assist him in his conquest against the Avengers. The twins joined him at the salvage yard to attempt to intimidate Ulysses Klaue out of his vibranium stores. During this incursion, the Avengers arrived, and the twins assisted in fighting them off, along with Ultron's drones. After the battle, in Seoul, Wanda realized that Ultron really wanted to destroy humanity, and the twins escaped away from him.

Later, they intercepted Ultron on the Seoul train, keeping him from pummeling Captain Rogers against the train wall. Ultron blasted the train controls, however, and Pietro sped away to save civilians while his sister worked to stop the runaway train. Cap brought the twins to Avengers tower where they found Stark and Banner attempting to work on the Vision. While Cap and Tony argued the merits of creating another A.I., Pietro sped through and unplugged all the machinery, though Thor broke in at the last minute to power the cradle back on.

After some deliberation, the twins joined the Avengers to return to Sokovia and fight Ultron one last time. Pietro and Wanda began the evacuations, and Pietro jumped straight ahead to begin smashing the Ultron drones. He happily assisted in defending the keystone with the rest of the Avengers, but when he saw Ultron's quinjet coming in for a strafing run against Barton, he sacrificed himself to save his new ally.
—DoctorBoson

Find a Hero!

Welcome!

From the ass that brought you Savage Everything! comes a blog solely dedicated to the Savaging of heroes, villains, and Extras from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (shorthanded as MCU)!

For those that are unaware, the MCU is the collection of movies and shows beginning with Iron Man back in 2008 produced in-house by Marvel. This includes The Avengers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Daredevil, among other works.

Again, to reiterate from the Ground Rules post, this will only be pulling from sources canon to the MCU—including some of the tie-in comics—but I won't be pulling from the comics universes, nor from movies produced by Fox or Sony, or any of the DC-verse (depending on how the cast ends up, I may end up creating their own separate Savageverse blog as well). If I miss a character (somehow) that you think deserves a spot on the blog, let me know!

If you like the MCU, check out the unofficial wiki for a fair bit of juicy content.

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